The present invention relates to an aid for teaching children to develop language skills and, more particularly, to a visual manipulative aid to be used in developing a child's reading and spelling skills.
In order to teach a child to read the English language, the child must learn to distinguish between the 26 different symbols comprising the standard English alphabet, and further must learn the sounds associated with each letter or combination of letters of the alphabet.
For children with short term memory problems, decoding, or the recognition of letters and the sounds they represent, can often be a difficult skill to develop. For such children, learning reading skills can become an overwhelming task due to the numerous symbols or letters which must be learned in order to practice reading skills.
By way of comparison, children are typically able to practice mathematical skills earlier than reading skills. This may be explained by noting that mathematics requires children to learn only 10 symbols, i.e., 0-9, in order to practice and learn math skills. Although a child must learn various combinations of the symbols, 0-9, the number of factors, or variations, that must be learned are significantly lower than the number of factors involved in learning to use the 26 symbols of the alphabet. Thus, as a result of being able to cope with the ten numeric symbols involved in mathematics, the child is able to practice the simple concepts involved in mathematics, such as addition and subtraction, relatively early. However, the overwhelming number of symbols required for learning reading skills becomes a roadblock to the child developing reading skills. This is particularly true for children with short-term memory disabilities for whom memorization of arbitrary symbols is particularly difficult.
In addition, when a child is not able to learn all of the 26 letters of the alphabet, he or she may develop the bad habit of guessing the sound of a word without regard to all of the letters in the word. For example, the child may recognize the sound of the first letter in the word and try to guess the ending of the word without regard to the letters forming the ending.
What is needed therefore is a system for teaching reading wherein the number of factors, or variables, which must be learned and understood are kept to a minimum. Further, there is a need for such a system wherein basic skills already developed by the child for recognizing differences among objects is used, and which permits the child to learn to carefully observe patterns within words without requiring the initial learning of the symbols used for the alphabet.